Alicization Uniting

by Reki Kawahara

  The white greatsword reached the source of the lightning at last. Its point hit the needle end of the rapier right on the nose.

  An ultra-high-pitched resonance arose, shaking the isolated chamber. For a few moments, Administrator’s silver rapier—the source of her godly power—and the white blade that was the fusion of Eugeo and the Blue Rose Sword grappled for supremacy. It looked like total stillness, but I could feel on my skin that this was only the precursor to the coming wave of destruction.

  What happened next passed as though it were happening in slow motion.

  Administrator’s rapier shattered into tiny pieces.

  The white greatsword split in two, spraying motes of light.

  The front end of the blade shot off, spinning, and silently sliced Administrator’s right arm clean off at the shoulder.

  The image burned itself into my retinas until sound and vibration finally caught up.

  Sacred resources burst forth from the shattered rapier and exploded in a colorful array that engulfed the room.

  “Eugeooooooo!!”

  Again, my scream was swallowed by the storm that buzzed and squealed like analog static. An oncoming shock wave smashed into my body as it hurtled toward the southern windows. I just barely managed to take cover behind one of the giant swords stuck into the ground that had been part of the golem just minutes ago.

  When I could at last stand again, I saw Administrator standing on the ground on her own two feet, clutching her shoulder with her remaining hand…and two large shards of metal at her feet.

  Eugeo’s broken sword still contained a faint trace of its glow. But even as I watched, it was growing weaker, pulsing like a beating heart, until it disappeared.

  The pieces of the white sword began to lose their sense of being, gradually reverting to human form.

  The piece from the tip to the middle of the blade became the legs.

  And the part including the guard and hilt became the torso and head.

  Eugeo was clutching the crystal prism to his chest, his eyes shut. His flaxen hair and milky skin were back to their full, solid texture.

  Then, the cross sections where his body was split in two erupted with blood, immediately flooding Administrator’s bare feet.

  “Ah……ah………”

  The sound that croaked from my throat came to my ears as though from a very far distance.

  The entire world lost color, lost smell, lost sound. Everything paled.

  In the midst of this existence without sensation, only the color of the blood that continued to spill out had any vivacity to it. Something sparkling descended right next to Eugeo, who was lying in a crimson sea.

  It landed and stuck in the liquid, sending a ripple outward—a slender blue-silver longsword, the Blue Rose Sword. I thought it was unharmed, but only for a moment; it promptly shattered, the pointed half of the sword breaking apart into ice crystals.

  Without its support, the handle half of the sword tipped over and landed next to Eugeo’s face. It sent up a splash of blood flecks that hit Eugeo’s cheek, only to roll back down his skin.

  I managed a few wobbling steps before I fell to my knees. With glassy eyes, I clutched my own sides, clinging to what warmth of Cardinal’s body still resided in my arms. But that faint heat did nothing to fill the growing void within me. It was like my mind, my body, and even my soul were going hollow.

  Let’s end this already.

  The thought rose from the emptiness like a bubble and popped.

  We—no, I—had lost, in every sense of the word.

  My one single reason for being in this place was to help free Eugeo’s soul into the real world. Instead, he’d sacrificed himself to protect me, and I was powerless, on my hands and knees—the man who would simply log out to reality when he died in the Underworld.

  I just want to fade out, to vanish from the world. I don’t want to see any more, hear any more.

  All I prayed for was my own obliteration.

  But the Underworld was its own reality, and its master was not a program designed to stop once you hit the bad ending.

  As she stood in the sea of blood, Administrator’s pale, featureless beauty took on the slightest bit of color, which vanished just as quickly. Her gorgeous voice brushed aside the silence of the room.

  “I have not suffered such injury in two hundred years. Since my fight with Lyserith.”

  It almost seemed like there was a note of praise, of admiration, in her voice.

  “In terms of priority, Eugeo’s converted sword shouldn’t have been able to match my Silvery Eternity. I’m surprised at the result. I suppose it was my mistake not recognizing that his sword wasn’t metallic in nature.”

  Drops of blood dripped from her right shoulder, creating more ripples in the puddle at her feet. She caught one in her left palm, converted it to light elements, and rubbed it on the wound. Instantly, the severed cross section sealed over into smooth skin.

  “Well,” she said, turning her mirror eyes and their long lashes toward me now that she was done with her emergency treatment, “I’ll admit that I’m a bit surprised that you were the one who lasted this long, little boy. I’m mildly curious as to why you came here without administrator privileges…but I’ve also grown tired of this. I will ask the one from the other side about how this came to be later. For now, I’ll let your blood and screams round out this confrontation.”

  She began to stride gracefully forward, betraying no sign that she was suffering from her severed arm. She stepped over Eugeo’s split body and proceeded toward me, leaving bloody footprints on the bare marble floor.

  As she walked, she reached out sideways, and something white flew up from the ground behind her. It was a slender right arm—the limb that Eugeo’s sword had cut off her.

  I thought she was going to reattach it to her shoulder, but instead, she lifted it up to her face, holding it by the wrist, and blew on it. Instantly, the arm was wreathed in purple light, shuddering mechanically as it underwent matter conversion.

  What appeared was a silver longsword, simple in design but beautifully elegant. Its finish wasn’t the perfect unbroken mirror that the rapier’s was, but given the fact that it was using the arm of the most powerful person in the world as its resource, I was certain that the power it contained was more than enough to separate my head from my shoulders.

  Death approached on quiet footsteps. I awaited it from my knees.

  In just a few seconds, the administrator of this world arrived before me, dazzlingly beautiful despite her missing arm, and gazed down at me.

  I looked up and met the colorful reflection of her mirror eyes. There was just a hint of mirth in them, and a gentle cast to her voice.

  “Good-bye, little boy. Let’s meet again someday on the other side.”

  She raised the sword, which caught the light of the moon.

  A blade as sharp as a razor cut a blue arc through space toward my neck.

  And then there was a silhouette occupying the space before me.

  Long hair fanned through the air.

  All I could do was watch as the wounded knight held her arms out wide.

  I had seen this before.

  Was I going

  to repeat

  the same

  mistake…

  …yet again?!

  The thought flashed into my head, stopping time.

  In a monochrome world without sound or color, a number of things happened in quick succession.

  A small hand brushed my right arm where it dangled lifelessly.

  The cold fear and resignation that consumed my entire being melted just a bit with the warmth of that palm.

  The negative thoughts hadn’t vanished. But the owner of the hand was telling me that it was okay to admit that weakness.

  “You don’t have to always win every time. If you lose eventually, if you fall, you just need to connect your heart, your will, to someone else.

  “I am certain that is how all of those who shared
time with you and moved on felt. Even I.

  “Which means you can stand again.

  “To protect someone you love.”

  I was conscious of a mild heat emanating from my body, or perhaps my mind, sending circuits of light into my frozen fluctlight.

  From the center of my chest, through my right shoulder, down my arm, into my fingers.

  My tense fingertips were suddenly engulfed in a burning heat.

  With speed I’d never experienced before, my right hand shot to the handle of my black sword nearby and grabbed it.

  Then time flowed once more.

  Administrator’s sword plunged down at the left shoulder of Alice, who stood with arms outstretched to take the blow for me. The sharp blade ripped the sleeve of the charred knight’s uniform and was just about to sink into her pale skin.

  I swung my sword as I rose to my feet, and I caught the end of the silver sword just in the nick of time, sending up a shower of sparks. The resulting shock pushed Administrator away from Alice and me.

  My free hand slipped around to steady Alice as she fell back against me, while the force of the impact pushed me toward the wall—it took both feet holding firm to prevent a collision. She rested her head against my right shoulder, then turned to look up at me with her blue eyes.

  “Oh…” Her cheeks, still ugly and burned from the fire attacks she’d suffered, crinkled into a smile. “You can still move…after all,” she whispered.

  “…Yeah,” I said, giving her as close to a smile as I could manage. “Now leave the rest to me.”

  “I think…I will.”

  And with that, Alice fell unconscious and slumped to her knees.

  I lowered her to the floor and set her back against the window. I sucked in a deep breath and stood again.

  Get some rest and leave this to me. Charlotte, Cardinal, and Eugeo have given their lives for mine…so I’ll make sure to pass it on to you.

  The one thing that was most important was to get Alice out of this enclosed space somehow. I had to fight this woman and at the very least tie if I couldn’t win. Even if that meant losing all my limbs, getting stabbed through the heart, or getting my head chopped off.

  I leveled my gaze, keenly aware of these possibilities, and stared at my foe.

  Administrator’s grin was as faint as ever as she gazed at the hand holding her sword. There was a part of her soft palm that was rubbed red and raw, probably from the earlier shock wave.

  “…I’m starting to get truly cross,” she said with glacial ferocity. Her mirror eyes, too, were as icy as though frost had gathered on them. “What is wrong with you people? Why do you struggle so hideously for no gain? The outcome of the battle is clear already. What meaning can there be in the process of reaching that foregone conclusion?”

  “The process is what’s important. The part where you either die crawling or die with a sword in your hand. That’s what makes us…human beings.”

  I closed my eyes and imagined my past self again. The self-image of Kirito the Black Swordsman that I’d kept defining for myself for years. The part of me that could never lose—the curse that said if I ever fell in battle, I’d lose everything I ever had.

  But now I needed to free myself from that fear and fixation.

  When my eyelids rose, long bangs hung over my eyes. I brushed them away with a gloved hand and swept my long black coat aside to brandish my longsword.

  A short distance away, Administrator raised an eyebrow, then put on a cruel smile like the one she’d worn when she took Cardinal’s life.

  “That black outfit…You look just like a black knight from the Dark Territory. Very well. If you simply must suffer, then I will ensure that your fate is very, very long and torturous. The kind that will make you beg for death’s merciful release.”

  “That won’t be enough to atone for my stupidity,” I muttered, dropping my stance and keeping my eyes on the tip of the silver sword in her left hand.

  I’d seen plenty of Administrator’s superlative power with sacred arts today, but given that her rapier—apparently named Silvery Eternity—was broken, I assumed she could no longer use that valuable resource as a power reserve to execute her rapid-fire arts. It was why she’d had to convert her own severed arm into this sword.

  Sword-on-sword fighting was exactly what I wanted, but her skill was a total unknown. I assumed that, like the Integrity Knights, she would gravitate toward major single-attack skills, but if my fight against Alice on the eightieth floor had taught me anything, it was that this wasn’t the weakness it might sound like.

  My weapon’s priority value was probably the lower of the two, so if our swords clashed enough, my already-damaged black sword would break. I had to keep close and try to seize victory with a combination attack, something that Administrator wouldn’t know about.

  With that in mind, I lowered my center of gravity farther, ready to charge. I slid my right foot forward and pulled my left back, tensing them against the hard floor.

  For her part, Administrator coolly raised her sword high behind her head. As I’d suspected, she was using a stance of the traditional High-Norkia style. The attack that would be unleashed was certain to be so fast and heavy that I couldn’t shrug it off with a deflection. I had to avoid it entirely and get past her defense.

  “…!”

  I sucked in a deep breath, tensing my stomach.

  The instant I saw her sword waver, I leaped off the floor.

  My enemy’s sword glowed blue. Detecting that it was the sword skill known to me as Vertical, I pushed harder off my left foot, veering my course right. Vertical was as straight as the name suggested, which made it difficult to aim at targets fleeing to the sides.

  The blue trail of the silver sword approached at terrifying speed. I turned to my left, trying desperately to make myself a small target and get past the blade. The end of my coat flapped wide and was severed clean off.

  I dodged it!

  Next I pushed off my right leg, reversing the sideways drift of my progress, and pulled back my sword…

  But the shine in Administrator’s sword did not vanish.

  “…?!”

  As I yelped in shock, her sword completely ignored all inertia and bounced back with a speed that made no sense. There was no way I could avoid it. Instead, I pushed my sword forward, trying to get it into the path of the swing.

  Gyaiiing! A cloud of sparks burst with the tremendous impact. I’d successfully blocked the attack, but the pressure was so intense that I felt my right wrist creak. The momentum was strong enough that I had to jump backward to keep from losing my balance. I could use footwork to dodge her upward swing and throw in a counter—

  —but once again, her skill with the sword surpassed my imagination.

  After tracing a V shape back to an upright position, her sword again roared downward. My weight was held forward, so I couldn’t evade the third attack and caught a shallow slice on my left breast. It was only a scratch, but worse than the pain was the fear and shock that jolted through my body.

  If the sword skill Administrator was using was the one I knew, then trying to dodge or half-heartedly block it would only get me killed.

  “Yaaaah!!” I roared to dispel my fear, activating a sword skill from a posture that wasn’t really meant for it. It was the single diagonal slash Slant.

  This time my expectations were dead-on, and Administrator’s sword practically teleported upward to an overhead position before striking for a fourth time, its deadliest blow yet.

  My black sword met the silver one as it came straight down. The special light effect that happened when two sword skills clashed lit up our faces.

  The fourth of a four-attack combination couldn’t be neutralized with a normal single skill. Fortunately for me, Administrator didn’t have her right arm now. Her balance was off, and the slash slipped to the left as it descended.

  Gyarinnng! When our swords separated, this time I leaped purposefully outside of swing range.

/>   I touched the cut on my chest and came away with a bit of red on my fingers. It wasn’t enough damage to need healing from sacred arts, but I was less concerned with my own flesh than I was horrified about the vivid slice across my leather coat, which was much higher quality than it looked—although it was produced only through the sheer power of my imagination.

  Since I was left speechless, Administrator took it upon herself to describe what she had done.

  “That was the One-Handed Sword’s four-part sword skill Vertical Square…wasn’t it?”

  There was a brief mental lag before my mind fully processed the meaning of what I’d just heard.

  She was correct about the name of the attack. But…

  Sword skill.

  She’d said the proper name.

  Yes, sword skills did exist in the Underworld, just as they did in old SAO. But here, they were “ultimate techniques,” and their dramatic effects were seen not as active system assistance but as simply the power unlocked from the sword once the user had undergone enough training.

  But those techniques these humans used were limited to single-attack skills like Vertical, Cyclone, and Avalanche. It was how I’d won so many duels and battles with my Aincrad-style continuous blade, and I assumed that it would be my only chance at victory here in the final battle, too.

  But if Administrator could utilize sword skills and execute combination skills of four parts or more, then my advantage was gone.

  I inched backward, consumed by confusion and panic—and then I caught sight of Eugeo’s maimed body. Blood was still seeping from where he’d been cleaved in half. He had minutes at best before his life ran out.

  That beset me with even more to worry about. I needed to think.

  Eugeo had been turned into an Integrity Knight, which had temporarily blocked his memory and caused him to fight me. So she must have done a pass on his memories when she did the Synthesis Ritual. In other words, it was possible that she’d scooped the name and movement of Vertical Square from Eugeo’s memories.

  If that was correct, then Administrator could do One-Handed Sword skills only up to mid-level expertise. I’d never shown my partner the highest skills, after all.